Rock Man 1951.

Pierce, Todd James

EVEN NOW IF YOU WERE TO ask me to draw my father I could produce a perfect portrait based solely on a photo: his eyes hazy with optimism, a straight line for a nose, and a dimpled chin jutting from a slightly oversized jaw. His pipe would be set in the corner of his mouth, a ribbon of smoke rising up from its mahogany bowl, on his head, a driving cap made of wool. He would be standing outside a movie theater, his face creased with ambition, though, when I was young I had very little idea as to the emotions that bubbled up in his soul.

Originally hired in 1936, my father was an assistant animator at Disney's, his specialty the movement and form of women. He drew Snow White and later the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio. For the Wishing Well sequence, he assisted with many scenes, Snow White's eyes angled up to a cloud-dappled sky, a length of rope passing smoothly through her hands. He died when I was two, struck down by a car while walking home. The car never stopped, leaving his body crumpled beside a tree. His face was so badly bruised that the coroner would not let my mother view him. In her place, a studio accountant stepped into the morgue, his felt hat respectfully held in his hands. When he emerged, he nodded with sorrow, confirming my mother's loss.

Though adults liked to tell me I possessed my father's wavy hair and dimpled chin, by my eighth birthday I believed that my greatest inheritance was not his physical beauty but the ability to draw. At first I drew animals, realistic dogs and cats, seagulls rigidly gliding through the air. I drew my mother. I drew images of myself. For most of sixth grade, I composed a twice-monthly comic featuring a superhero I named Rock Man whose body was composed of stone.

The first person I let read my comic was my mother, who was also a studio artist. She sat next to me on our sofa, her eyes working carefully over each page. The previous year she'd taught me many things about drawing, such as how to line up a person's ears and eyebrows and how to sink a neckline below the shoulders so that the form appeared realistic. But over time she'd become less enthusiastic about my interest in drawing. She didn't like that I spent my afternoons reading comics. She didn't like that I only had two friends at school, both of whom were more or less loners like me.

When she'd finished with the comic, she lifted her face so I could see her hazel eyes. She was, of course, proud, but I could tell that her pride was coupled with concern. We were at a stage in our relationship where she wasn't quite sure how to raise me. She believed that I should start arranging small parts of my life on my own and that I should have a larger circle of friends. "That was amazing," she said, handing the comic back to me.

"It's only five pages. I was thinking I'd draw at least ten." She smoothed the bangs from my face. "Do you really like it?"

I felt her hesitate, as she held me close. "Of course," she said. "I love that you can draw."

Every two or three weeks, the kids in my class passed a new issue of Rock Man from desk to desk, as Mrs. Fowler attempted to teach us long division. They loved the adventures of this superhero who lived at our school, sleeping in a cave beneath the janitor's office, and wandering through our classrooms at night. My drawings improved with each issue. I played with perspective and shadow. In issue #z, Rock Man saved my morn from a purse-snatcher. In #4, he arrested two Communist thugs hiding out in a barn at the edge of town. By the sixth issue, Rock Man had constructed a network of tunnels, complete with observation turrets where he could watch the neighborhood, making sure all us kids were safe as evening darkened toward night.

After my mother read that issue, she looked at me with thin eyes. At first I thought the story had upset her, then she put a hand on my shoulder. "These are really quite good," she said.

She waited for me to say something, but I couldn't think of anything to say.

"Look," she continued, "over at the studio, there's an old drafting table--the kind with a lightbox. I don't think anyone would mind if you used it."

"I didn't think you wanted me to become an artist."

Her face brightened to a smile. "The thing is," she said, "mothers are good at raising up boys. But you're no longer a boy. You're becoming a man. I'm not sure I know what's best for you anymore."

For a moment I considered this. "I could really use a lightbox," I said.

She moved as though she were about to leave, but then settled back into the couch. "Just promise me something. Promise you won't spend all your time drawing and that you'll be a little more social."

"OK," I said. "I will."

At school Tyler and Bobby liked to read comics with me at lunch. We greatly admired The Lone Ranger, America's Best, and Tick Tock Tales. Tyler had the strange habit of wearing his father's old army shirts, but Bobby was a good-looking boy with pale blue eyes that made him appear kind. One day, I asked him to play baseball with me at lunch.

"Baseball?" he said. "You don't even like baseball."

"I promised my mom."

"Your mom made you promise that?"

"Kind of," I said.

He raised his eyebrows in surprise. "Well, kick me in the keister. My mom never says anything about baseball."

The drafting table my mother showed me was located in a storage room at the studio fifteen feet underground. In actuality, it was a discarded animator's desk, with a fixed pegboard and a lightbox, as well as a few drawers to hold pencils. She watched me set my first drawing down on a frosted pane of glass. "You are keeping up with your end of the bargain," she said, "aren't you?"

"Bobby and I played baseball yesterday."

She placed a new dip pen into my hand, along with a few nibs. "That's good enough for me."

That month, I created three new issues. The lightbox allowed me to trace my rough drawings onto clean sheets of paper. With the finer nibs, I sharpened Rock Man's features so that his face more accurately expressed emotion: his anger and frustration as well as a troubled kindness. For a while, I had a unique identity at school. I was an artist, a storyteller. I wasn't necessarily well-liked, but I was well-known. Some of my classmates told me I should sell my comics to a publisher. Others simply patted me on the back. For a while things went well, but then something happened, something I didn't expect: Willy Sato, a quiet boy in the back row, started to bring his own homemade comics to school.

Willy was a thin kid with short, dark hair who ate lunch on the lawn with his brother, Milo. The one thing we all knew about Willy was this: though his father was only half-Japanese, he'd spent the last year of the war in a relocation camp while Willy and his mother remained in a one-bedroom apartment on the far side of town. Around school, kids whispered that Willy's family was related to some of the Japs who'd bombed Pearl Harbor, with Frankie Moran and Dave O'Connor speculating that Willy might even know the soldiers who killed their fathers. Willy never responded to these charges, absorbing each accusation silently, as though it might possibly be true.

Willy's first comic book introduced a superhero who lived underwater. Though the storyline wasn't very good, the backgrounds were beautifully drawn: fine lines, an interesting use of white space to suggest light, fish as real as any I'd seen in an aquarium. In his next comic, Willy introduced a superhero named the Icicle whose breath turned people to ice. Again, the story wasn't particularly original--with the Icicle chasing bank robbers--but many drawings were amazing, with the Icicle's frosty breath glistening in the sun. Late in April, he brought his third comic to school--a comic that included a superhero everyone knew. It featured Rock Man.

Just before free reading time, Willy set his slim volume on top of the class bookshelf, the same place I used as a distribution point for all of my comics. Jenny Andrews was the first to read it, finishing the book in under ten minutes. Stacy Walsh looked at it next, who then handed it off to Bobby. "You should see this," he said, turning the comic toward me.

At first I was a little sore that Willy had used my character. I was irritated for three or four pages, then an odd thing happened: the drawings were so good that my irritation melted into a pleasant confusion. The backgrounds were like photographs: the trees and cars, all completely real. In many panels I noticed something new: tiny erasure marks, the ghost of imperfect lines fading behind lines that were more exact and true. It was then that I suspected the comic hadn't been made for the whole class so much as for me.

The issue was titled "The Camp." In it, Rock Man carried Willy on his shoulders down an empty highway to look for the body of an uncle who died in a relocation camp during the war. The camp, now empty, was nothing more than a collection of tents and fences. In each tent, Rock Man and Willy found a few chairs tipped on their sides, maybe a mattress as well. As they ventured into a building marked HQ, Rock Man turned on a record player with the flick of his stony finger. In the cafeteria, they found a rice bowl, chipped at the rim, which Rock Man placed thoughtfully into Willy's hands.

Unable to locate the uncle's body, they walked to a stretch of sand marked with crosses, but none of them identified the dead by name. Visibly upset, Rock Man took the rice bowl from Willy. He broke off a triangular shard from its rim then dragged it across the side of his face, carving a groove in his clayey cheek. Eyes wide with understanding, Willy stepped forward and presented himself. Rock Man considered his actions before lifting the shard. Blood appeared as black ink on Willy's cheek, two drops falling like commas. As the sun hovered low on the horizon, Rock Man and Willy filled the bowl with sand, both of them understanding that this container, once full, would be a suitable memorial for the uncle, a man whose body never would be found.

I read Willy's comic first during recess then again at lunch, as I sat beneath a jacaranda tree. I wondered at the realism in his panels. He included details that I had never considered--power lines and streetlights, oil stains in the center of a cement driveway--and these details made his comic feel more honest than anything I'd ever drawn. Ultimately, though, I was taken by the way Willy portrayed himself. In many panels he presented himself as a self-conscious boy, with his arms held close to his body, his gestures tentative and spare, as though he understood kids made fun of him at school.

When I finally closed the comic into my lap, I saw Willy on the other side of our school's activity field. He sat on the grass with his younger brother, Milo, the two of them sharing lunch from a single bag. I stared at him for a few seconds, expecting to see a purple scar crossing his cheek, but his skin was smooth and unmarked. He walked over to me, his hands in his pockets, his eyes angled down.

"I didn't mean to steal Rock Man," he said. "I just wanted to draw him--to see if I could make something good. I hope you aren't mad."

"Your drawings are super good. Your backgrounds are better than mine."

He glanced at the playground, where most of the kids were engaged in a game of wagon wheel, then his focus returned to me. "It took me a long time to understand Rock Man's super power. He doesn't fly or anything."

"Rock Man's strong because he's made of stone."

"No," Willy touched my arm in a sad way, as though I didn't understand something essential about myself. "Rock Man's strong because he knows what it's like to be alone."

From his pocket, he withdrew a card. On it, he'd typed his phone number. "I know most kids here don't like me. So you don't have to call or anything."

I watched him slip across the field, but before he sat down, he looked back, his lips arranged into a reluctant smile. It was odd, that grin, thin and tentative, then his face assumed a more familiar expression, one that gave hardly anything away.

The next day I brought Willy over to the studio lot, pointing out those buildings where I knew people: the security kiosk and commissary, the machine shop and gardeners shed. I singled out the Animation Building, where my father once worked. Last I took him to my mother's building, the Ink and Paint Department. There were two types of women there: inkers, who traced animation drawings onto clear cels, and painters, who finished off the tracings with color. You could easily tell them apart: the inkers worked with their desktops pitched at an angle; the painters worked with their desktops perfectly flat so the colors wouldn't run.

Though my mother had once wanted to draw illustrations for magazines, in the months following my father's death, she had resigned herself to working at the studio, where, out of sympathy, her boss had offered her a significant raise and a desk in the coolest part of the room. Pluto, she'd told me, was easiest to draw, as a dog's lines were long and supple. The human characters were the most difficult, as their forms were composed of short lines and tight angles.

I was under the impression that my new friendship with Willy might demonstrate my willingness to be more social. But when my mother turned my way, I saw skepticism flash across her face, as though Willy were yet another loner I was claiming as a friend. "This here's Willy," I explained. "He's going to help me with stuff downstairs."

Dressed in a midnight blue jacket, my mother took a good look at Willy--a gaze that seemed to take him all in. She offered a practiced smile, one both pleasant and a little sad. It was then I realized that she was having a difficult day. "That's OK with me," she said. "But the two of you need to be quiet. Voices carry."

"We'll keep it down," I said.

As I led Willy through the rest of the building, he kept looking at one desk and then another, his eyes wide and curious. Twice he stopped to wonder at individual drawings, but the women, who were allowed only a few minutes per cel, did not bother to acknowledge us.

The underground hallway connected Ink and Paint to the Animation Building, which was basically a tunnel joining the world of my mother to that of my father. The original idea was simple. Traffic boys would carry boxes of finished drawings through the passageway to protect the artwork from the elements. But in practice, traffic boys rarely descended underground, except on rainy days.

Once I turned on the lights, I showed Willy that the walkway was more than a simple corridor filled with telephone wires and air conditioning ducts. It contained many doors as well. The first closet, I showed him, was filled with bins of sheet music. In another, camera equipment was arranged into wooden crates. Lastly I unlatched the door that led to my secret office--a large space filled with storage boxes labeled with the type of tags the studio had used ten or twenty years ago.

I let Willy poke around a little. He opened one box to find the plaster cast of a woman's hand. In another, publicity photos. When Willy's curiosity was satisfied, I guided him behind the boxes, to the animator's desk where I'd drawn the last three issues of Rock Man.

"Aside from your mother," he said, "does anyone know you come down here?"

"Some of the women," I said. "But no one cares. Just watch out for Mr. Disney."

"Mr. Disney?"

"He has a temper. Or at least that's what my mom says."

That afternoon, we brainstormed ideas for our first collaborative Rock Man comic. We wanted it to be twice as long as any book we'd previously drawn. We wanted it to have really important ideas, the type of thing that maybe even our teachers might like. Most of all, we wanted it to have a color cover, an image that was big and splashy and gorgeous.

For the story, I suggested that Rock Man visit that site in Nevada where the army tried out atomic bombs, but Willy didn't care much for this. Then I suggested Rock Man build a secret underground city where kids would be safe if Communists ever attacked California. That one, too, didn't capture his interest.

While I tried to come up with more story ideas, Willy hunched over the desk, a clean sheet of paper before him, and roughed out images of Rock Man. In one, Rock Man walked through downtown Los Angeles, his body miraculously enlarged so that he was as big as an office building. In another, he stared off at a nearby carnival, looking with longing at kids on a Ferris wheel. In the third, Rock Man stepped out into the sea, leaving the beach for dark water, his hand raised as if to say good-bye.

I had no idea how any of these drawings related to a story, yet I liked this last one. I watched as Willy shaded the waves then added dark clouds at the edge of the horizon. At five-thirty, the lights in my secret office grew bright, the overhead bulbs flickering with power. Willy looked up at me, his concentration broken.

"That happens," I explained, "when they switch off the lights upstairs."

As we cleaned up our papers, I recognized something in Willy's drawing that made it more compelling: as Rock Man marched out into the surf slowly, his face was long and flat, as though a sadness were settling over him.

"OK to change it?" I asked.

With a nod, Willy responded.

I re-drew Rock Man's head and upper body with determined movements so that Willy could see how I worked. My mom had shown me how to develop Rock Man's arms to emphasize his muscles. She'd also shown me how to shade his skin so it looked like stone. More than anything, I wanted Willy to see how I developed Rock Man's face.

I sketched an oval and then angled in contours and planes. In my version, Rock Man was looking back, his lips slightly parted, his face cut up with sorrow. In terms of my own ability, I found the eyes the most difficult feature to draw. Little kids tended to draw big eyes. The trick, as my mother explained it, was to make the eyes seem big without distorting their proportions. I penciled in Rock Man's eyes half-closed, the pupils dark and wide, as though his heart were filled with longing.

"There," I said. "That's better."

Preparing to leave, we returned the pencils to their drawer and unplugged the lightbox. I put a few drawings in my bag to inspire me later. "I'll see if I can make up a story tonight."

"OK," he said.

With our book bags cinched up, we cracked open the door and peered out into the hallway. Satisfied we were alone, we scurried up to Ink and Paint then to a courtyard just outside the building. Already I sensed that Willy liked to draw Rock Man for reasons different from my own. Back then, I don't think I could've explained this observation in words--how Willy's actions must've been organized by a deep ache to belong--but I felt this aspect of his personality nonetheless. Once on the studio green, we found six women smoking cigarettes, my mother toward the back of the group.

She appeared tired, her shoulders slumped, though twice I caught her looking up at the Animation Building. It was then that I understood the problem: she'd spent part of her day thinking about my father, missing him or wondering what it would be like if he were still around. I missed him, too, though it was different for me: I only knew what he looked like from photos, and I couldn't remember the sound of his voice. I suppose I missed the idea of him, whereas my mother missed his actual company.

"I was hoping we could walk home together," she said.

Along with two of my mother's friends, we started off toward the studio gate. I liked walking with them, as they often touched my shoulders and asked about my classes at school. It was like being part of a large family, where you could just be yourself and not worry too much about how people saw you.

We stopped only once, spotting Mr. Disney in the distance. He was standing outside the Animation Building, a cigarette fixed in the corner of his mouth. He was talking to--or perhaps arguing with--a couple of animators, his voice loud, wrinkles appearing across his brow. But then he noticed us there at the edge of the lawn. He offered us a weary smile then returned to his discussion.

At the front gate, one of my mother's friends walked to the bus stop, the other waited for a ride. Willy had a curious way of saying good-bye. He shook my mother's hand then bowed slightly, before continuing on toward town.

We stood there a moment, my mother and me, then she laid her arm across my back, soft and kind, bringing me to her side. I touched her hand, as I still liked to have her near me. In the distance, I heard the music-box serenade of an ice cream truck and also the movement of cars. "I've been thinking about how to explain this," she began, "how to explain why it's important that you make friends at school."

"Because I'm getting older?"

She closed her eyes then opened them, as though she were considering my question. "If you had an uncle then maybe you could spend time with him. Or if your grandfather were still around. But I'm afraid it's just us--only you and me." She looked off at the street, a long stretch of asphalt leading into darkness. "I'm not sure how to put this. But there are things you might learn from boys, things I can't really teach you."

"You mean from boys like Willy?"

She held my hand briefly, turning it over then turning it back. "Men find strength in groups," she said. "They're competitive. They tend to pick on people when they don't fit in."

"I don't think men are that war."

"I know you don't." She looked at me for a long moment, then her expression changed, her face projecting a happy sadness, which was an emotion that I believed only adults could feel. She smiled as though she had suddenly decided that I might be too young for this discussion. Instead of continuing, she bent down on one knee, the two of us looking off at the studio, those familiar buildings now stained with moonlight and shadows. "Did I ever point out your father's old office?"

"No," I replied.

She tipped a finger toward the Animation Building, singling out the wing furthest from us. "Over there," she said. "On the second story."

I pointed to a window half-covered by a metal awning. "That one?"

"That one there," she confirmed.

All the way home, I tried to work through the things my mother had told me, that friendships with other boys would help protect me and maybe teach me things as well. I didn't really know what this meant, nor did I know if it was true. But it didn't matter. All I could think about was that corner office, the one with the tall window at the end of the building.

Of course, I'd always known that my father worked in animation, only I'd never known the exact room where he'd spent his final days. Twice, the previous summer, I'd wandered through that building, looking at old movie posters displayed on the walls and all of the small offices arranged side-by-side. I tried to get a good feel for the place, its wide, clean hallways and high ceilings. But I didn't know anyone who worked there, so I didn't stay long.

As my mother and I continued down the street, beneath trees and streetlights, I recalled photos I'd seen of my father: slanting against the fender of a Packard; reclining into a hammock, his fingers laced across his chest; and of course standing outside the Animation Building while other animators picketed the studio gates in the distance. That was the story everyone told me, my father the loyalist, one of the few animators who'd chosen not to strike.

It went like this: back in 1941 union organizers encouraged Disney artists to strike for better wages. But my father never joined them. Each day he showed up for work, entering through the back gate to avoid the angry picket line. Along with a few other animators, he finished the last inbetweens for Dumbo, allowing the picture to be released on time. As best I understand it, my father believed that he was helping to save the studio from possible bankruptcy, that once the strike was over the other animators would eventually thank him for his work. The irony is this: had he joined the union, he would've been at their organizational meeting, safely seated in a folding chair, instead of walking down that street where he was struck down by a passing car.

I thought about this for a long time, that photograph of my father--with his wavy hair and high cheekbones--an image captured a few days before he died. I tried to picture him in his second-story office, his thin body hunched over an animation desk. But as we neared our street, the vision began to fade, growing dim by degrees, until I saw our apartment building emerging from the gray textures of dusk. It was a two-story complex, with a courtyard in the middle, a weedy lawn out back. One of my classmates, Frankie Moran, sat on the courtyard steps, pretending to read a magazine. He only looked up after my mom stepped inside, leaving me to collect the mail.

Frankie was a big kid, with thick arms, thick hands. I could feel his eyes on me, like a pair of greasy fingers touching my shoulder. "Jimmy," he said, "what are you doing hanging around with Willy?"

"He likes to draw," I said. "He's good at it."

Folding the magazine under his arm, he stood up in such a way that I was aware how big he was. He exhaled with disappointment. "My dad was killed in the war. You know, the Japs took down his whole ship."

"Willy didn't have anything to do with it."

"I don't mean Willy himself. Maybe his family. Or his relatives or Something."

"That's bunk," I said. "Willy's just a kid."

Frankie ran a hand through his hair just like adults did when they were upset. I expected his eyes to hold a dark fire, but that's not what I found there. Instead I found something colder, like ice and anger joined together. "Willy's different," he continued. "His whole family. That's what my mom says."

"What do you mean, different?"

"They just don't believe the same things we do."

"So what?" I said. "Willy's always nice to me."

That night, my mother didn't say anything more about my father. We ate dinner and listened to the radio. I finished my homework then read the new issue of Tick Tock Tales, hoping that it would inspire me. There was this one story about an American spy living in Germany. Then another about Soviet troops building an A-bomb in Russia. I wondered if Rock Man might somehow involve himself in these situations. But they didn't seem large enough for the double issue Willy and I wanted to draw.

The following morning I looked for Willy but he didn't arrive at school until after the second bell sounded. We sat through our math lesson then reviewed vocabulary words, with Mrs. Fowler asking us to spell each one out loud. During recess, I found Willy on the playground. His eyes were glassy, his face pale. "I got an idea last night," he said then handed me six pages filled with drawings.

"You did all this?"

He dipped his head with pride. "It's a start," he said.

The story began at sunset with Rock Man roaming through his underground tunnels, when he noticed a young boy chucking stones into an alley. Rock Man watched as a stone connected with a cat, the animal mewing in pain. Rock Man followed the boy past a line of stores, all of them closed, then through an empty field. Once the boy was home, Rock Man waited as the lights dimmed inside the house. In three separate panels the moon crossed the sky. Once Rock Man was sure the boy was asleep, he entered through the kitchen then moved down a hallway before finally locating the boy's room. From a newspaper article pinned to the wall, Rock Man learned the boy's name was David and that his father, a marine, had been killed by the Japanese in the battle for Guadalcanal.

Over the next two nights, Rock Man followed David around town, watching as the boy slumped through a grove of eucalyptus trees then set pennies on a railroad track just before a train pulled into town. Gradually Rock Man came to believe that the bad feelings burning in David's belly might not burn so bright if he had something more to help him remember his father: a ring, a watch, even the boots that his father wore into battle. On the third night, after the boy was safe in bed, Rock Man climbed into a massive drainage pipe, the type that carried rainwater out to sea.

Hours later, on the beach, he strapped longboat oars to his feet, making primitive flippers, then walked stiffly into the shallows. Only once did he turn back. He looked at the city for a long time: industrial smokestacks coughing up marshmallow clouds, stones heaped up to form buildings, distant billboards advertising cigarettes. He tilted his head, his gray eyes puzzled and sad, then he ducked underwater. In the final panel, a line of moonlight snaked across an empty sea.

The story, of course, was nowhere near done, but already I was taken with it. I loved the way Willy altered perspective, a combination of long shots and close-ups. He instinctively knew which scenes to depict, like the moment after an alley cat's leg was pegged by a stone. But most of all I loved the photographic elements that graced his drawings: cars parked on lonely streets, dead leaves littering the ground, weeds sprouting up through cracks in the sidewalk. Willy presented our city with a precision that made the story feel like something larger than a comic book, like an actual memory or the type of dream brought on by too much sleep.

Before I could return the pages, Willy explained the rest of the story as best he could. After walking across the ocean floor, Rock Man would find the island where David's father had been killed. There would be abandoned tanks and jeeps, a lot of dead bodies. "I've seen photos of that place," he explained.

"Photos?"

"From Canada. My dad gets foreign papers in the mail."

I considered this for a moment, believing that with actual photos we might draw some really good panels. But then I understood the problem: Frankie Moran would beat Willy senseless if he ever made a comic about the war. "Frankie's a big kid. He might bust your arm," I said. "Or worse."

Willy shifted how he was sitting so that his back straitened. His face appeared defiant as though his chin had been pushed high by an invisible finger. "I'm not afraid of Frankie."

"Everyone's afraid of him."

"I don't care if he breaks my arm."

"You don't?" I asked.

He checked the playground to make sure we were alone. Around us, the grass was empty, littered only with sandwich wrappers and Popsicle sticks. "In this comic, Rock Man will feel sad for the American soldiers. He'll say they were brave and courageous." For a moment, he appeared slightly older, his shoulders pushed back with a practiced confidence. "Then all of the kids will know I'm not really Japanese."

"Frankie gets crazy mad."

"Maybe he does." His gaze fell to the artwork neatly collected in his lap, and just like that, he appeared young again, all of the confidence draining out of him like sand. "I want to make a really good comic," he said. "I need you to help me with it."

One of the playground monitors blew her whistle, which meant recess was over, but Willy didn't move. He sat there, his muddy eyes pleading.

We didn't go to the studio that day, as I told my mom I would be playing baseball. Instead we set up shop at the library, all of our drawings arranged on one of the back tables. Using a ruler, Willy squared in panels to create a layout, while I rubbed out a few images and redrew them. Willy favored portraits or traditional side views, while I liked to position Rock Man in a partial profile as though his body were in motion. In the panel where the alley cat appeared, I sketched out an expression of disbelief onto Rock Man's face. In the panel where Rock Man, standing in the waves, looked back at the city, I shaded his eyes with yearning to suggest that he didn't want to leave home.

All week we worked on our comic, sneaking over to the studio whenever we got the chance. Willy showed me the photos of Guadalcanal, one grainy image of a gunship run aground, another of corpses reclining into the dunes. Around four o'clock, we usually took a break, walking outside, where our eyes slowly adjusted to the sunlight. We watched gardeners hose down walkways. Over in the machine shop, we talked to a man who repaired cameras. Each time we walked past the Animation Building, I looked up at my father's old office. Sometimes I would stand on the lawn, gazing up through the window glass only to notice faint shadows moving across the far side of the room.

Around school, I observed the little ways that Willy was beginning to change. He no longer kept his sweater safely stored inside his backpack but instead hung it on one of the pegs at the back of the classroom. He bought chocolate milk from the school cafeteria, which was something new for him. He accompanied his brother over to the sandbox where the little kids played. Most notably, he no longer went out of his way to avoid Frankie. Once, by the drinking fountain, he stood next to the wall as Frankie passed him on the walkway. Another time, he did not move away as Frankie joined his study group at the big reading table.

During these days, my life fell into a routine. I did my homework, I went to school, I played a little baseball. Most afternoons Willy and I worked on our comic. I penciled in the figure of Rock Man, solemnly marching across the ocean floor, and Willy filled in the backgrounds: fish and seaweed, light angling through the depths. Rock Man never stopped to take in his surroundings, nor did he wonder at the beauty of the undersea world. Only when he came across a sunken cargo ship did he finally allow himself a moment of contemplation. With an expression of concern, he noticed a circular hole in the hull, the telltale sign of a torpedo.

At first, I drew the beach at Guadalcanal as it appeared in Willy's photos, with skeletal corpses rotting on distant dunes, but to me, the panel didn't feel right. It didn't feel like part of the story. One by one, I erased the bodies, leaving only three at the far end of the beach.

Beside the first corpse, Rock Man knelt, placing his hand on what remained of the man's shoulder and examined the dog tags, only to find it was not David's father. He knelt beside the second soldier as well. When he approached the third, he noticed that the dead man's hand clutched a crucifix. Rock Man stood there, his eyes narrowed, until finally he cocked his head as though he understood something important about war.

Rock Man never found the gunship, as we'd once planned, nor did he find a Sherman tank hidden behind the trees. Instead, as he entered the jungle, he saw a path running to the center of the island, smooth and empty. No bodies. No jeeps. No tents. In a clearing, he observed charred stones arranged into a fire pit. Hanging from a tree, he found a helmet. At the end of the trail, he discovered a set of dog tags resting in the dirt, the surface smooth, the metal holding no name at all.

Willy didn't care much for these panels, believing that I'd ventured too far from actual history. That beach would've been a graveyard, he reminded me, the jungle littered with equipment. But for our story I sensed my panels were right.

Willy crossed his arms in frustration. "What's Rock Man supposed to bring back for David?"

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe a stone? Or something else from the island."

"He can't bring back a stone."

"The whole island's empty. His father's gone."

"The helmet. What about that?"

"It's not his father's helmet," I said.

"The dog tags then, the ones with no name."

"I don't think so. I don't think they would really help David that much."

Again, I showed Willy my drawings of the beach, a long line of sand with only three bodies. I knew I wasn't very good at putting my ideas into words. But David, I sensed, didn't need something so obvious as a helmet. He needed a memento that, over time, would help him understand his father. Then the answer came to me. The island plants were modeled on those in photos. They were strange, unlike any that grew near us. "A branch," I said. "A twig with a few leaves. Rock Man can bring that."

Willy lifted his eyes to the ceiling, considering my plan. But I could tell he didn't much like it.

As he handed back my drawings, I understood that we weren't looking at the story in the same way. I moved beside him, placing my hand on his shoulder. "Before Rock Man leaves, I'll have him draw a flag in the sand," I said. "Big Stars and Stripes, like he's claiming the island for America."

At this Willy's lips widened into a smile.

As the lightbox was only large enough to accommodate one person, I occasionally left Willy to ink panels by himself. Sometimes I visited my mother, watching her methodically trace a drawing onto a clean sheet of celluloid. A calmness existed between us now, as though she understood I wasn't quite ready to leave boyhood. I needed a few more months of comic books and superheroes before I advanced to middle school and thought about who I might become as an adult.

On other days I walked over to the studio commissary where I asked one of the servers for cookies. I talked to traffic boys as they pushed carts from building to building. One afternoon I sat in the security kiosk, watching Officer O'Hare wave cars into the parking lot. But eventually I made my way over to the Animation Building.

The first time I passed through its entrance I walked with purpose so I might blend in, but just inside the main hallway a tall man looked at me with concern. As soon as he was gone I doubled back, flew down two sets of stairs, until I found myself safely underground among the telephone wires and heating ducts.

On my second visit I moved quickly to the upper floors, but in my father's wing I found four men smoking cigarettes. Once again I doubled back, until I found Willy at the animation desk. He sat there, taking a break from the panels. He was drafting out the image for our cover: Rock Man proudly holding the helmet of an American soldier in his hand.

That afternoon, we stayed at the studio well into the evening, the two of us working on the cover. I sharpened Rock Man's features, so that his face held a sorrowful respect. It was the best piece of art we'd produced, so sure and honest I felt that I could step into the image and move around.

Those days were like a fever dream. I could close my eyes and see Rock Man moving along the island path. I could even hear his feet crunch down onto the sand. I'd never felt so close to a drawing in my life: Rock Man was both part of me and also a hero who existed out in the world. I was never sure how much of this experience Willy shared. For me, our comic book was a beautiful mystery to solve. For Willy, it was something else entirely, a gift he would present to our school, an explanation of who he wanted to be.

In class I regularly let my thoughts wander, my concentration floating off to Rock Man. None of my classmates seemed to mind. Rather, they were tolerant of my absentmindedness, never snickering when Mrs. Fowler called me to the board. Willy's situation was more difficult to read. He never volunteered a solution in math class, nor did he answer vocabulary questions. From time to time, he showed our classmates rough drawings that would eventually be included in our comic book. One day, during reading hour, he unfolded a panel that featured Rock Man moving through our town at night. Another time, he shared the image of Rock Man marching into the surf. When he presented a pencil drawing of Rock Man beside a ragged American flag, I saw how some boys responded. Three or four looked at it with wonder, though two reacted with confusion. Frankie Moran crossed his arms, his gaze holding a quiet anger, then he turned to me. I nodded my head stiffly, trying to communicate that this comic book would be just as good as those I'd brought to school earlier in the year. But Frankie didn't seem to understand.

On the day Willy and I inked the final page, I took the first shift at the desk. Our story was nearly done, with Rock Man returning home, his shoulders slouched with fatigue. In the top panel, Rock Man approached David's house at night, in his hand a curved twig holding tiny tear-shaped leaves. In the second, Rock Man opened the door leading to David's bedroom. In the next, he approached the bed with caution, noticing that even in sleep, the boy's mouth was puckered with anger.

With that, I set the dip pen down. I rose from the chair, shaking some of the stiffness from my fingers, then offered the desk to Willy. Once seated, he looked over my drawings, his eyes shifting from one panel to the next. He lingered over the twig, his expression betraying doubt.

When he turned to me, I simply nodded. "Rock Man should leave it with David." With my finger, I indicated an empty place on the boy's pillow.

"And then what?" he said.

"Well someday, perhaps, he'll learn where it's from."

Willy thought about this for a moment, his eyebrows lowered in concentration, then his expression lightened, as though he, too, understood that this was all Rock Man could give the boy, that David would have to figure out the rest on his own.

Our plan to distribute the comic book was fairly simple. That evening, on his way home, Willy would take the comic book over to school. He'd leave the issue atop the bookcase, where students would discover it first thing the following day. Maybe some kids would take it to breakfast. Maybe others would carry it out on the playground. But right now, in my underground office, I watched Willy cut into a flesh panel with a few lines that outlined Rock Man's thoughtful expression.

As usual, I checked the hallway before venturing out, but instead of heading up through Ink and Paint, I climbed the stairs that rose to the Animation Building. I told myself I was going to buy two bottles of Coca-Cola, a little something that Willy and I could enjoy as we checked the pages one last time, but, really, I knew what I was doing.

The building that day was empty, as though most animators were in a meeting. As I passed down the main corridor, I observed two secretaries talking to each other. I saw a man with flecks of paint on his shirt gazing absently out a window. I noticed a room filled with six in-betweeners, busily working on their drawings. Once I found the right hallway, I forgot about everything else.

The door to my father's old office was partially open, allowing me to see a single desk positioned next to the window with a jacket folded over the chair. As I moved closer, I discovered that the room was larger than I had imagined, with bookshelves and a cabinet, an oval rug centered on the floor. Toward the back, I saw a corkboard, filled with drawings: boys in animal skins, boys sleeping under trees. There was something about these drawings, the sad desperation on the boys' faces that interested me. I tried to get a better look, but I heard footsteps, the double beat of leather clapping down the hall. A tall man with short brown hair glanced my way with bewildered eyes before stepping into the office and swinging the door shut.

The next morning I woke early, as sunlight slanted through my window and warmed my face. I lay in bed for a few minutes. It was odd, the way I felt. I experienced an emptiness coupled with anticipation, a weird, mixed-up emotion in which I was sad to have finished drawing my comic book but excited that it was now done. Before I swung my feet onto the floor, I wondered who would be the first to find it. Then I wondered if anyone, right now, was picking it up off the bookcase at school.

I left the apartment later than usual as I wanted at least a few kids to read the new Rock Man before I arrived. On campus I walked past a line of cars where fathers dropped off their kids, past the cafeteria where oatmeal and eggs were served each morning. I looked at my classmates, wondering if any of them had already read the comic, but their faces didn't betray that knowledge. I thought someone might shoot me a smile or slap me on the back, but none of that happened. It was then I saw Mrs. Fowler standing outside her classroom, her eyes fixed on me with interest.

No one on the playground mentioned Rock Man. In our classroom, the space atop the bookcase was empty, covered only by a thin layer of dust. Also empty, the peg where Willy hung his sweater and his chair at the back of the room. It was then that I noticed Frankie Moran seated at his desk, his hands folded smugly, his eyes watching me as I set down my books.

By the second bell, all of the desks were occupied except the one that belonged to Willy. As a class, we worked through multiplication problems and then struggled through long division. We spelled words out loud then named the five parts of a sentence. Just before recess, Willy slouched into our classroom. He reluctantly hung his sweater on his usual peg then sank into his chair, offering me only a pained look of apology. Before removing a workbook, he glanced around, his eyes moving from desk to desk. Only a few boys noticed him: Frankie Moran and two other self-righteous delinquents at the back of the room.

The problem, as I later understood it, was this: at the start of the day, one boy had given Mrs. Fowler our comic, claiming the story upset him. The dead soldiers so concerned Mrs. Fowler that she gave the issue to our principal, Mr. Blitz, who called Willy to his office. Mr. Blitz explained that it was inappropriate for boys to sensationalize the war with silly drawings. When Willy explained that our comic was meant to be realistic, Mr. Blitz cut him short: "Son, at our school there are plenty of families without a father. Kids here don't need to be reminded of their loss."

Willy told me these things at recess, as we sat beneath the jacaranda tree, his eyes focused on something far away, then he explained that Mr. Blitz would return our comic only after classes let out for summer. At first I believed I was to blame, that my drawings of Guadalcanal were too imaginative, with the island holding only a few corpses and not depicting the massacre preserved in photos. But Willy assured me this wasn't the case. "That's not it," he said. "I don't think we were supposed to draw any dead people at all."

For a while Willy continued to watch baseball games at lunch. He showed up in the cafeteria to buy chocolate milk and sometimes a Popsicle as well. He remained at the big study table, but soon retreated to the smaller reading groups on the other side of the room. He talked about creating a new Rock Man comic, an issue in which Rock Man fought Commie spies, but the only panel he ever drew was an image of Rock Man holding an American flag. By then I could feel the tensions at school, the invisible fault lines that carved up our playground. Frankie Moran never admitted to ratting out our comic, but I suspected it was him, as did most kids at school.

When I told my mother what happened, she drew me into her arms as though she had seen this coming all along. "There are days you remind me of your father," she said. "Strong-willed and determined, always wrapped up in a project."

In the weeks that followed, I often thought of Rock Man. I pictured him as a protector, a friend, a person who would never let me down.

I imagined a story in which he appeared to Willy, instructing him to draw a new comic. I imagined another in which he built a clubhouse with logs he found by the creek. But the most powerful story was the one in which Rock Man guided me through the Animation Building, corridor after corridor, until we arrived in the dim office where my father once worked. I pictured the scene a number of ways: taking place when the building was empty, taking place when people filled its halls. But the ending was always the same: with his wide, heavy hand on my shoulder, Rock Man guided me into my father's old office, to the window at the far end of the room. In the expanse below, l expected to see cars in the parking lot and gardeners watering the lawn, but instead I saw men picketing the studio gates, a few of them glancing up at us with anger. One man lifted his felt hat as though he could see us there--or rather, as though he could see my father. He jabbed a handmade sign toward us--fiery letters, THERE ARE NO STRINGS ON ME.

As daylight dimmed from the sky Rock Man stood with me, looking at all the people out on the street. Slowly the strikers disappeared--their bodies fading like mist--until only one figure remained. It was then I realized that Rock Man was no longer in the room with me. He was out there, by the studio gates. In his hand he held a twig identical to the one he'd left in David's room, a corkscrew vine with teardrop leaves hanging like jewels. He made sure I saw it before setting it on the ground.

On three separate afternoons I tried to visit my father's old office, but each time I found the room occupied. One time the man with short brown hair sat at the desk, another time a thin man stood in the doorway. On my third and final attempt, I stood before a closed door, only to see it suddenly swing open, with Walt Disney clicking his heels out into the hall. His eyes glistened, confused to see a boy so young in this building. He wasn't as tall as I'd imagined, his black hair lightly threaded with gray. He raised one eyebrow, his face hardening toward anger, but then he stopped himself. His features fell slack. He was good with people, I could tell. "Can I help you?" he asked. Already I was starting to suspect that my father's death was complicated in ways I didn't yet know. Ten years later, an animator would tell me a rumor he once heard, that my father's passing was a terrible accident, a scare tactic attempted by union organizers that went horribly wrong. But back then, I didn't know any of this. I was just a kid, twelve years old, who could feel his life beginning to change, the colors of adult complexities shading what was left of a child's world. "My father," I said. "A long time ago, he worked in this office."

It was then that Mr. Disney's expression began to change, as though he could sense eddies of confusion turning inside me. He put his hand on my shoulder, his touch firm like that of an uncle, then turned me toward the office door. "Come one," he said. "Let's go in and have a look around."